Wurlitzer Building to be saved, turned into boutique hotel

[davewindsor]

What you're running into is a geometric problem, not a policy problem. You're absolutely right that adding more hotels means fewer spots for a larger volume of people. But that's why building/operating good transit will only become more critical if Detroit continues to rebound. There is simply not enough space for each person to drive and park a car at the densities of a major, healthy downtown business district. It's fine to say that Detroit is the Motor City, but it's still a city, and cities operate under certain geometric facts. One of those is that cars take up too much space for a high density downtown business district to rely solely on them.

Right now Detroit can get away with this because it has a relatively unoccupied CBD relative to successful cities. But if redevelopment continues, this will become less and less feasible. Density and automobile reliance are diametrically opposed in a zero-sum game. You cannot have both. Requiring every new or renovated building in downtown Detroit to build additional parking is not physically workable over the long term, and attempting to do so will hold back the city's redevelopment. Parking is going to get scarcer if Detroit does well, and that's a good and manageable problem to have. It means people want to be in your city and businesses want to locate there. The long-term solution is to build transit so that tens of thousands of people from Oakland County or other parts of the city can take the train and leave Dave from Windsor a parking spot.

Public transportation isn't a practical solution to metro. Most businesses in metro are not located in downtown, but all across metro. If, for example, you're a salesman, it simply isn't practical to travel by bus from downtown Detroit to Troy and several other cities in metro. If you're a manager responsible for several different profit centers across metro, it's just not practical to take the bus. You have to take a car. Metro is spread out so much that public transportation as a solution would fail on so many levels.